Friday, 20 April 2012

BIM, sustainability and hope for the future.

I was at a fascinating talk at Cullinan's office yesterday about sustainability organisations, at which the main speaker was Gary Newman from the Association of Sustainable Building Products who believes that there should be a very different approach to defining sustainability than that in the BRE Green Guide - that individual products should be assessed, rather than having generic categories.

Some of this was a bit esoteric, but it was interesting to see the weight that he and the other speaker gave to the potential of BIM to make our buildings greener. 'With BIM we can really engage with resource efficiency and responsible use of materials,' the said. 'We can really understand the inputs we are making.' we are certainly not there yet - precisely because everything is inter-related in terms of sustainability, it seems that the algorithms available for use in BIM cannot really cope with these issues in a sophisticated way at present. But this confidence should drive development.